The rest of the 100 (in alphabetical order by company): Virginia McFerran, Optum
As a managing partner at Optum Ventures (OV), Virginia McFerran said she specialised in “growing digital health organisations that are taking bold steps to transform care, and reduce transaction friction by enabling reliable, actionable insights”.
McFerran was most recently CEO and president of Optum Analytics, where she led a team with “diverse competencies to create and deliver health care informatics to provider, payer, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies”.
Funded by US-based healthcare provider Optum, the $250m Optum Ventures fund will be led by partners AG Breitenstein and McFerran, who will report to Larry Renfro, chief executive of Optum. It operates out of offices in Boston and Menlo Park.
The fund will particularly seek out early-stage companies that are working on technologies to deliver better healthcare, such as digital health startups that aim to improve access to services and businesses that make the healthcare system easier to navigate and more reliable.
Portfolio companies will also be given strategic advice to develop and grow through Optum’s network of experts and partnerships. They will also benefit from Optum’s expertise to bring their products to market and scale more quickly.
Optum Ventures has already made four investments, though it did not reveal any amounts. The businesses were Apervita, a cloud-based platform that seeks to make the development of analytic applications more efficient; Buoy Health has created a digital health assistant that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help patients understand symptoms and provide guidance on what care they should seek; Mindstrong Health has developed AI and machine learning technology to detect and treat neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, such as depression and schizophrenia, by analysing a user’s interaction with their smartphone; and Shyft Analytics operates a cloud-based data and analytics platform aimed at life science businesses to reduce cost and risk while boosting clinical and commercial performance.
McFerran said the attraction of corporate venturing was in helping healthcare companies adjust to the changing use of data in the industry. She said: “Healthcare lags as an industry in the adoption and routine use of data and analytics behind advertising, travel, cybersecurity, retail and energy. The rapid evolution of these industries is raising and reshaping consumer demand toward transparent, personalised, precision, consumer-focused experiences.
“As things stand today, healthcare is ill-equipped to meet this new demand function. I have worked as an operator and believe putting corporate capital to work that enables entrepreneurs access to a huge test bed will be the fastest path to real change and value creation.”
Previously, Virginia was the chief information officer (CIO) of UCLA Health and the CIO at Weill Cornell Medical Center, and held leadership positions at The Salk Institute and Microsoft.
She is a director at New York-listed Douglas Emmett, and is on the board of the Dream Foundation.
If the fund works as planned then McFerran, who spends her spare time hiking and climbing, could have a theme to work into the novel she is currently writing.
